


When Bad Writing Attacks: X-Files, "Terms of Endearment" and "The Rain King"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [13]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Bad Writing, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Rain King, david amann, jeffrey bell, terms of endearment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-16
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-02-09 03:49:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1967817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which I use IMDB to answer the question, "Why does Season 6, after such a strong start, suck as hard as it does in the second half?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Bad Writing Attacks: X-Files, "Terms of Endearment" and "The Rain King"

 

In  _Sunset Boulevard,_ Joe Gillis—the hot young writer who has become the semi-willing kept man of former silent film star Norma Desmond—complains in a voiceover about how little credit the screenwriters get. People don’t really believe that someone  _writes_ the film, he says; “they think the actors just make it up as they go along.” Well, Season 6 of the X-Files is out to prove everyone wrong. 

One of the things that makes rewatch so different is the existence of IMDB. Also I just pay more attention to the production process now; but seriously, IMDB puts the kind of information about the behind-the-scenes of your favorite show that used to be the exclusive province of SMOFs within reach of every jerk with an internet connection. This means, among other things, that we can better appreciate the role that specific writers play—for good or for ill—in the life cycle of a show. In this case, it helps us explain why, after a strong start, season 6 begins an interrupted but overall steady progress toward the toilet.

In season 6, the mythology episodes are still written by the inner circle (Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, John Shiban—all guys who are producers as well as writers and have been with the show for years). At the beginning of the season, so are the Monster Of The Weeks. Vince Gilligan contributed “Drive,” Chris Carter brought us “Triangle” and “How The Ghosts Stole Christmas,” and both Gilligan and Carter collaborated with Spotnitz and Shiban on the two-parter “Dreamland.”

Then we hit “Terms of Endearment.” And this begins a string of MOTWs authored by new ‘talent’ brought on board, presumably, because the Dreamland team is too busy with other projects. Carter was working on two new TV series that would be launched in the next few years: “Harsh Realm,” in which a real soldier is trapped in a video game, and “The Lone Gunmen,” in which Byers, Langley and Frohicke get their own show. (Both shows lasted a single season. Each show also is responsible for one Godawful episode of the X-Files which was designed to promote it: the Lone-Gunmen-centric “Three of a Kind,” in which Vince Gilligan gets to indulge his getting-Scully-drunk fetish to the full, and the Season 7 episode “First Person Shooter,” possibly the noisiest and most boring episode they ever made.) 

The first time I saw “Terms of Endearment” I was focused on the badness of the reproductive politics. Briefly, in TOE, an apparently clean-cut insurance salesman named Wayne is actually a demon who is obsessed with fathering a ‘normal’ child. When his pregnant wife Laura (well, one of his wives; he’s also married to a woman named Betsy, who’s also pregnant) discovers that their unborn child has the series of bony deformities that indicate the baby’s demonic origins, Wayne drugs her with mandrake to induce both hallucinations and labor; he steals the demon baby, kills it, and buries it. This sets off a chain of investigations during which Mulder figures out “Wayne’s” demonic identity and discovers the existence of Betsy, who’s also giantly pregnant, and has also been told that her baby has bony deformities. Wayne tries to do the same thing to Betsy, but she stops him. Wayne is discovered on the grounds of Betsy’s house, digging something up; after he’s arrested, Scully finds four babies buried there, all apparently normal. It becomes clear that Betsy is herself a demon, and that whereas Wayne was killing all the *abnormal* babies (holding out for a human one), Betsy was killing all of her *normal* babies (because she wanted a demon one). The deformities apparently don’t show up until very late in the pregnancy, so these are not so much abortions as infanticides; but still, the demonic imagery and the fact that the term “babykiller” is thrown around with abandon inevitably invoke the abortion debate, which makes it kind of a problem that it’s Betsy, the woman who’s controlling her own fertility instead of letting a male demon do it, who is repeatedly described as even MORE evil than Wayne. 

Anyway, the whole episode is pretty putrid as far as gender politics go; but it’s also just not very good. David Amann, the newbie who wrote this, doesn’t seem to know what to do with Scully—basically he treats her like Mulder’s errand boy—and, as we see in the picture above, Amann has apparently forgotten that Mulder has a B.A. in psychology, that his career is founded on his skill as a psychological profiler, and that he spent years working in the Behavior Science Unit at the FBI before he got started on all this X-Files stuff. Amann is responsible for 3 lackluster Season 6 episodes; “Agua Mala” has its moments, but “Rush” is pretty tired and boring and everyone involved seems to be phoning it in.

But “Terms of Endearment” looks like “Clyde Bruckman” (which BTW also gets knocked off in season 6 by Vince Gilligan in the in-no-way-as-interesting episode “Tithonous”) when you put it up next to what comes next: “The Rain King.” On rewatch I have to say this episode got marginally better because I was better able to appreciate the nuances of Duchovny and Anderson’s performances—which are absolutely the only thing that make this episode even watchable. Victoria Jackson, a Saturday Night Live alum who guest stars, is just horrible. She’s both intensely annoying and at the same time devoid of any emotional intensity. The plot, in addition to being dopey (Holman Hardt, the local weatherman residing in the tiny Midwestern town where this episode takes place, involuntarily controls the regional weather, which sympathizes with his repressed emotions), is just as bad from a gender politics point of view as “Terms of Endearment.” Holman is in love with Sheila, Jackson’s character, who likes him as a friend but is always in love with some other man. Sheila eventually develops a crush on Mulder, which provides one of the only actually good moments of this epsiode, viz, Scully’s reaction to the sight of Mulder being kissed by Sheila, in which astonishment soon yields to beautifully understated Spock-like snark. But my point is: Sheila doesn’t care about Holman in That Way, and this has such cataclysmic meteorological effects that in order to get the hell out of this one-horse town both Mulder and Scully have to convince Sheila to reciprocate. It’s all played for comedy; but when you realize that basically they are coercing her into allowing Holman to get some, and you recall that Star Trek: TOS did this plot in season one with “Charlie X,” in which a nearly-omnipotent teenager develops a seriously unrequited and stalkery crush on Yeoman Rand which threatens the whole Enterprise, and you recall that even in series 1 of TOS which was freaking 1966-67 even James T. Spacebabe-Loving Kirk realized that the solution to this was NOT to force Yeoman Rand to give Charlie X some loving for the sake of the ship but rather to tell Charlie X he was going to have to get over himself, it stops being funny.

The only thing—the ONLY thing—that could redeem a plot like this would be really good writing. Alas, the writing for “The Rain King” is terrible. I don’t just mean not good. I mean awful. There are exchanges in this episode where the dialogue is so bad that the actors just give up on finding a way to deliver it. All the characters are stereotyped about as broadly as they can be, and a running gag about how everyone in this town assumes that Mulder and Scully are sleeping together comes off as stupid and annoying rather than A Deeper Parallel. The only genuinely funny thing that happens in this supposedly comic episode is that a freak mini-tornado sucks a cow up out of a nearby field and drops it through the roof of Mulder’s hotel room. Mulder’s reaction is pretty funny ("That cow had my name on it, Scully!"). But when dropping a cow on the lead is the high point of your episode…you’re in trouble. 

And yet Bell went on to write another four episodes, including “Alpha,” another season 6 episode about a killer dog. I selected "Alpha," back in the day, as my Single Worst X-Files Ever. Of course I never saw most of seasons 8 & 9.

So. As the writing goes, so goes the show. The actors can save it to some extent but not forever. And if the writing is bad enough for long enough you will eventually lose the actors.

Well, I said to myself, I wonder where these guys went to after they were done helping ruin the X-Files. So I checked out David Amann’s filmography.

Oh my God. CASTLE?

Yes. Yes, Mr. “Terms of Endearment” went to  _Castle_ , where he has been responsible for a number of the episodes that helped drive me away from the show. He invented the 3XK killer, for instance—God how I hated all of those plots—and was repsonsible for “Target,” the first half of the two-parter in which Alexis is abducted and Castle goes on a Liam-Neeson style patriarchal quest to reclaim her, during which he tortures a suspect to make him talk and Beckett lets him. ARGH! Where is the justice? How can one bad writer be allowed to ruin TWO shows that I like? 

As for Bell, perpetrator of “Rain King”…well, he went on to have quite a productive career in the industry as both a writer and producer…and is now a writer and executive producer at “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

I hope he got better.


End file.
